After learning that Jim Nabors died yesterday, a flood of impressions I held within me – from many years watching re-runs of The Andy Griffith Show – washed over me. Like many Americans, I used to come home and watch reruns of shows that had comic figures – ranging from Leave it to Beaver, Little […]

Larry David’s opening monologue for SNL – which included a joke about picking up girls in Concentration Camps – was contested by many on Twitter and elsewhere.  The harshest criticism came from Thane Rosenbaum in his piece for the Los Angeles Journal entitled “Larry David Goes One Cringe Too Far.”   Reading some of these articles […]

The events of last week with Harvey Weinstein have prompted many powerful articles (good, in terms of prompting awareness of violent sexual actions that were an “open secret” in Hollywood, and really bad, in terms of prompting anti-Semitic remarks and insane conspiracy theories).   After reading Mark Oppenheimer’s controversial Op-Ed piece for Tablet, entitled “The […]

A Baal Teshuva literally means a “master of return.”  It is the name for a person who seemingly, out of nowhere (perhaps because he wasn’t raised in Judaism, or had broken away from it, or had no knowledge of it) decides to “return” to God and Judaism (or being Jewish).  When I first came across […]

I wonder if a new trend is developing in the journalistic world in which this or that journalist calls Donald Trump or someone in his administration a schlemiel (see this article – for instance -that calls Sean Spicer a schlemiel character).  Mind you – as I’ve said many times on this blog – there are […]

Woody Allen’s Zelig character showed American audiences that schlemiels come in all sizes, shapes, and colors.  The schlemiel is a chamelon.  His Jewishness – argues Daniel Itzkovitz – demonstrates the fact that the essence of the schlemiel character is non-essence.  The schlemiel is constantly adapting and changing.   And this – argues Itzkovitz, drawing on […]